Let me explain something to you, because you don’t seem to understand it already. Your TV shows are available every day, every week, and every month of the year for free. They fly through the air (and travel through cables) at no a la carte charge to customers. There was also this thing called a VCR, which more recently has been replaced by something much better called a PVR (personal video recorder) or DVR (digital video recorder), which people can rent from any cable or satellite company, or buy for their TVs or computers. These devices record your free TV shows and let people watch them later. With only a few button presses, people can now even record an entire season of your shows automatically and watch it whenever they want. For free.

NBC, why don’t you get it? This move is so lame that I will get offended the next time someone shorten my current employer, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation slightly wrong and call it the NBC (even internationally we use the Norwegian abbreviation “NRK”). I used to find it amusing when people did that mistake.

The internet is here to stay. It has already changed the rules. Can we go on now?

Back in the twenties John Reith, the first general director of the BBC said that their most important mission was to “inform, educate and entertain”. If Mr. Reith had defined this mission today, would he said something else? Has the internet changed the main mission of a license funded public broadcaster?

There is no doubt about the fact that the internet is a perfect place to inform, educate and entertain. And it is possible for a public broadcaster to reach it’s goal without much change even when it is starting to utilize the internet to deliver information, education and entertainment.

But should license funded broadcasters like the BBC, the NRK in Norway, SVT in Sweden and DR in Denmark do something in addition to this when they start using the internet to deliver their content? Should we add some words? The internet opens up a totally new way of using content. A couple of words that pop up in my mind are share, participate, open, facilitate, make available…

I don’t think inform, educate and entertain cover the mantra of content, conversation, context and control. Or simply how to be successful on the internet. What do you think? Will the internet give public broadcasters new and important roles? I most definitely think so.

The comments are open. (And if you want to discuss this in Norwegian more or less directly related to the NRK I have also posted this article and opened for discussion over at NRKbeta.)